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September 26, In 2018, a row of technology directors walked into an auditorium made of marble and wood and sat behind a desk microphone and a small bottle of water. They were all called to testify before the U.S. Senate Trade Committee on a dry issue — the protection and privacy of customer data — that has recently plagued many people.
Committee Chairman John Thune of South Dakota ordered the hearing, and then began listing the events of the past year that showed a data-driven economy could go wrong. It has been 12 months since a completely unavoidable breach at the Equifax credit agency reported that it claimed the names, social security numbers and other sensitive credentials of more than 145 million Americans. And six months had passed since then Facebook Immersed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a political intelligence company managed to gather the private information of 87 million Facebook users to help put Donald Trump in the White House for Bond’s apparent psychographic scheme.
To prevent such abuses, the European Union and the state of California adopted broad new data privacy rules. Now Congress, Thun said, was ready to write its own regulations. “The question is no longer whether we need a federal law to protect consumer privacy,” he noted. “The question is, what form will this law take?” Sitting in front of the senator, ready to help answer that question, were representatives of two telecommunications companies, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Amazon.
It is noteworthy that anyone in the lineup was on Facebook or Equifax, which was dealt with individually by Congress. So for those in charge, the hearing had the opportunity to start lobbying for friendly regulations, and to assure Congress, of course, their the companies were completely in control of the problem.
No executive at the hearing had as much confidence in this count as Andrew DeVore, Amazon’s representative, who the company rarely declares to Congress. After a brief greeting, he began his opening remarks by citing senators to a basic maxim of his company: “Amazon’s mission is to be the most customer-focused company on Earth.” It was a conditional line, but it seemed to the associate general councilor that he was speaking a little as a messenger on a larger and more important planet.
DeVore, a former prosecutor with rugged features, made it clear that what Amazon needed most from lawmakers was minimal interference. Consumer confidence was already Amazon’s top priority, and a commitment to privacy and data security was sewn into everything the company did. “We design our products and services so that customers understand when their data is collected and when they share it,” he said. “Our customers have the confidence to manage our data carefully and sensibly.”
At this last point, DeVore was probably making a safe assumption. That year, a study by Georgetown University said Amazon was the second most trusted institution in the United States, after the military. But companies like Facebook have learned in recent years that public confidence can be fragile. And looking back, the most interesting thing about Amazon’s 2018 testimonial is what DeVore didn’t say.
At the time, the division responsible for keeping customer data for the company’s retail business within Amazon was in a state of turmoil: few employees, demoralized, often eroded by changes in leadership and, according to its executives, severely disabled. in his ability to do his job. That year and earlier, the group warned Amazon executives that the trader’s information was in jeopardy. And the company’s practices were increasing risk.
according to the internal documents examined by Show up Center for Investigative Reporting and WIRED, Amazon’s vast empire of customer data: what you look for, what you buy, what you see, what pill you take, what you say to Alexa, and a metastasis record of what’s in front of you. the door, so wide, fragmented, and promiscuously shared within the company, where the security division could not map everything, let alone properly defend the boundaries.
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